I like Birds

 

 

I like birds, and Walt, and Whit, and Whitman. I like kindred spirits- especially when found between the lines of Ann of Green Gables, they're my favorites if I haven't mentioned. I like books, and crushing looks, like the ones in “silly” fables. I like the strings at the end of my sleeves and tugging on them with my fingers. I like standing still on sidewalks before the light turns green, I sway and sing, to the pedometer of cars driving, and passing, and honking, and creeping.

I like wind that pushes my hair into my face, even on good hair days, because it takes me back to better days, and better ways, before I found out about the other. I like seeing kids do weird things at the store, while their mothers look bored, and when we smile at one another, I know we know something their mothers forgot because they were taught to forget along the way. So I say hey to the kid who says he’s a vegetable. And I laugh when his head becomes a bed of cucumbers and lettuce as he leans under the spraying water in the produce section. And when he’s pushed away by the bored pilot of his cart, his lettuce head bobbing down the aisles, I remember to remember to laugh at my kid when he does the same thing.

I like twelve o’clock when the sun meets me at my window, and the thirty minutes or so it takes it to pass. I like imagining strawberries growing in snow, because it’s unusually beautiful the white against red, and maybe it’s just all up in my head, but it seems it should happen as so.  I like kicking acorns down the road, and crunching the others below my shoes. I like pretending I’m somewhere far away just before I reach my drive. And in those few seconds when I imagine “he” is at my door, my heart has never felt more alive.

Sometimes I like getting lost in my car on a street I'm supposed to know. When the signs and houses have changed, but I feel the same, in a good way. Other times I like when I'm so different, it seems appropriate to meet the street I walked on with bare feet as a kid.

I like the winter more than the spring, when the trees become dead looking and white things. I like the sleepy quiet, my disapearing white breaths. I like cold fingers and toes, because I know when I get home, there's a fire and cover and family there. And I like the cold stars that are really far and white and bright and quiet. I like plaid flannel shirts and coats and socks, especially the ones that reach my knees, and save them from the freeze of January, when snow flakes could fall.

I like the nights when I cuddle like a cat in the downy chair in my room, or my living tomb, where I’ve kept my life so near. My piano and guitar, my books and writing desk, my tin lid with holes from when I went shooting guns with ken, the Alabama hat that was my great uncle Jim's, my Bigdaddy’s carved birds, the locket and pictures and postcards and paintings, all of it I hold so dear.

I like the time after I close my eyes, not the minutes before. I like feeling the warm in my bed, the pillow under my head, and knowing everything else is shut out behind my door. I like thinking and dreaming before I am sleeping, and I’ll do it for as long as I can. And then I’m waking again, the light warm on the bed, and I try to lie still and hold on to it all while listening to the clicking of my fan. I try not to move, so I don’t ruin the visions I had of you, because somewhere between the night and the day, when I was quietly slipping away, you’re all my thoughts knew.